Ted Kosmatka - The Games

“What?” Silas asked.

“Mom told me not to ask you about your work,” he said.

Silas laughed out loud. “But you just couldn’t help it, could you?”

The boy pursed his lips against a sly, involuntary grin. “I figured I’d just ask polite. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

“I don’t mind. This place has helped.”

There was silence between them for a moment, then, “What does it look like?”

Silas tried to think of a way to describe it so the boy would understand. “Do you know what a gargoyle is?”

“Yeah, one of those things that hangs off the side of old buildings in old movies.”

“Well, it looks a little like a baby gargoyle.”

“Must be pretty ugly, then.”

“No,” Silas said. “That’s part of the problem. It’s not ugly at all.”

“And that’s the part you don’t want to talk about? Mom says you’re under a lot of stress.”

“She must think I’m emotionally fragile.”

“No, she just says you work too hard, and this was supposed to be your vacation.”

“Well, she’d be right about that.” Silas tousled the boy’s hair and stood. “C’mon, we only have about three hours left. We’d better get a move on if we’re going to get a shot off.”

They repacked and set off toward the lake, hoping to find better luck. Forty minutes later, they found it. It was sixty yards ahead, grazing in the overhang of a tree. Silas paused, letting Eric think he saw the deer first.

“I see one,” Eric whispered.

“Good eyes. You take the left flank. I’ll take the right. One of us should get a shot.”

They moved forward in what Silas wanted to think of as a two-man V formation, if that was possible. Silas kept the deer just within sight, then slowly moved back in on it. Across the clearing, he saw Eric come to a stop about twenty-five yards short. The deer stopped browsing and lifted its head to sniff at the air. It was a magnificent animal, over five feet tall at the shoulder, with a wide, elaborate rack. It looked like it owned the mountainside. Silas was grateful for the lack of wind. He crept forward, carrying the bow low to the ground in his right hand. He stopped.

The deer sniffed at the air again; then, apparently satisfied, it lowered its head for a meal of grass. Silas couldn’t see the boy.

The arrow came free from his pack in one slow, fluid movement from over his shoulder. His eyes stayed with the deer as he notched the arrow. Arm muscles bunched as he pulled the bowstring back. He paused. As his eye found the deer at the tip of his arrow, Silas remembered what it was like to be on a first hunt. He waited for Eric. His right arm began to complain. Soft annoyance at first but growing louder. The deer took a step, lifting its head. Silas closed one eye, and the deer’s shoulder disappeared from his vision, blotted out completely by the arrow’s tip. His arm was screaming now. His grip began to tremble. He took his eye off the deer and scanned the bushes to the side of the clearing. What is the boy waiting for? He focused on the deer again and had to concentrate to keep the bow steady. Finally, he heard it, a soft twang from off to his left. But the shot went high, a blur over the deer’s back. It startled into a long, reflexive leap.

Silas’s release followed in the next heartbeat. The string whirred.

He knew the shot was true as it left his bow. A good archer always knows.

The arrow lanced through the air, a momentary streak of aluminum. It connected solidly on the upper part of the deer’s shoulder—

—and then bounced off.

The arrow fell harmlessly to the grass.

Silas’s cry of triumph chased the white tail deeper into the valley.

“Great shot,” Eric said when he materialized across the opening.

Silas jogged toward the place where the arrow had landed and smiled as he bent to pick it from the grass. Its round plastic tip had changed from clear white to a deep blue. He held it up for the grinning boy to see.

It was a two-hour walk back to the lodge, and they made their way lazily up the side of the valley, enjoying the scenery now that the pressure of the hunt was finally over. At the top of the rise, they paused for one final look before hiking down the other side.

The lodge was enormous and built of raw timber in the old pioneer style, but the inside was state of the art. The structure was as ironic as the system it preserved. The man behind the counter smiled when Silas handed him the blue-tipped arrow.

“A buck,” he observed. The man scanned the arrow into a computer, and the printer buzzed softly for a second. He handed Silas the sheet. “Suitable for framing. Apollo is one of our finest bucks.”

Silas lowered the sheet so that he and the boy could look it over at the same time. It was a large color picture of the deer he’d shot, photographed at some previous time standing near a brook with the mountain in the background. The deer’s vital statistics were recorded in the lower-right corner of the sheet: age, estimated weight, number of points. A microchip planted under the deer’s skin had communicated with the arrow to approximate the arrow’s strike point. A red dot now appeared on the deer’s shoulder in the photograph.

“A good shot,” the man said. “Just a bit high.”

“We’ll take a frame with it,” Silas said.

Preservation safaris were expensive, but when Silas handed the picture to Eric, the boy’s face made it all worthwhile.

IT WAS nearly nine-thirty when Silas finally walked his nephew up the sidewalk to his front step. Nights tended to get cold in Colorado, even at this time of year, and the air carried a chill in it.

Ashley answered the door and hugged her son inside. She had a hug for Silas in the foyer, clapping his back.

“Did you boys have a good time?” she asked.

“Yeah, we got one.” Eric handed his mother the framed photo, and she considered it critically for a moment. “And whose little red dot is this?”

“His,” the boy admitted, jamming a thumb in Silas’s direction.

“It was a joint effort. Eric flanked him.” Silas tousled the boy’s hair again while he tried to pull away.

Eric snatched the picture back from his mother, kicked off his shoes, and bounded up the stairs by twos. “Hey, Dad. Dad!” He disappeared down the hall.

Silas followed his sister up the stairs of the split-level house and into the kitchen. The kitchen was the visiting area of the home. It was a familial trait; Silas knew she’d got that social peculiarity from their mother.

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks, my stomach,” he explained.

“Still bothering you?”

“Only when I eat or drink. And sometimes when I breathe.”

“Oh, is that all?”

Silas smiled. “I’ll take some milk, if you’ve got it.” He pulled a chair out from the table and sat.

She poured him a glass just as her husband, Jeff, appeared from down the hall. “High and to the right,” Silas’s brother-in-law said, holding the picture out in front of him with both hands and shaking his head sadly. “Same old Silas, never could hit something that didn’t have concentric red circles on it.”

Silas shook hands with his brother-in-law. Jeff had been out of town on business when Silas picked the boy up late last night, so it’d been almost two months since they had last seen each other.

Jeff was blond to an extent usually reserved for Scandinavian children, but it seemed to fit him—the overlying sense of the man was one of youthfulness. Silas knew him to be in his late thirties, but Jeff could easily have passed for ten or twelve years younger. Put a ball cap on the guy, shave the chin fuzz, and he’d probably get carded at a bar. He was fine-boned and slender, but that description belied his true nature. Jeff liked his sports and held a second-degree black belt.